TrickingTrapster

Well then, all that tells me is that you would like to have stickmen for employees on the station. I am still calling bs on it, and crap like this is exactly why I left the server for so long in the first place. I ask for confirmation a long time ago, someone goes 'yeah looks good', and now something that I consider part of my character has to be changed because 'hurr durr we didn't catch it before'. It's the stupid disability rule all over again and it's why I'm probably going to leave the server once more, and if anyone asks me 'is Aurora good?' I'll say no. Pay attention when someone asks tyvm. And I'm still keeping my point of not being combative about it. I was genuinely asking what about the LOOC text was being passive aggressive and simply got a warning slapped onto me.

The comment about ruining Yumi even more was referring to the fact that she used to be in Engineering before the rule was applied that muteness was not allowed outside of service, which essentially flushed 2 years of RP down the drain for me when it happened, so yeah I was salty about that. The second part, for which you gave me a warning, was literally me telling them that I got bwoinked for talking so I needed to stop. I was trying to stop the conversation with that, not raging about it. Also, the 'nobody noticed it before' thing is huge bs to me. This flavor text is what, 4 years old now. Idk, didn't keep track, but pretty much has been there since Yumi was created at least 2 maps ago. I have played this character with characters from other admins, old and new, and literally no one has ever had an issue with it. I really doubt no one has read Yumi's FT before, and I have asked admins before 'is it okay like this?' and they have given the go ahead. The rules on flavor text have not changed since then, so I am really calling for a massive bs on that one.

BYOND Key: TrickingTrapster Staff BYOND Key: Roostercat12 Game ID: (No idea, didn't check, don't know how to find it again) Reason for Complaint: It's a bit of a two in one, but the warning was also essentially a two in one. First, I was asked to change the flavor text for my character, Yumi Yotin. A flavor text that I have had for multiple years now, even back when I was still admin. I have reread the rules, and nothing pertaining to flavor text was changed, so I have no idea why I was asked to change it now. I would like to keep it the way it was, since it feels part of the character. Second, I was asked to stop talking about the above in LOOC. I said okay, and communicated in LOOC that I was asked to stop, so that the other players I was conversing with knew I would stop responding to the conversation, after which I received a warning for doing that last bit, which I absolutely do not agree with. To summarize, I want the warning removed, and be allowed to return my flavor text to the way it was.

I didn't say anything about wanting it to be peaceful all the time, I just want the actual mechanical combat to be toned down a lot. If I wanted to play a 'click-you-win' game I'd play Call of Duty or Cookie Clicker. Also, as a side note, yes I do vote extended every round because I like RP involving characters that I like to be canon and not interrupted every other shift by a red alert. I think I've said this before, but the core of my point is combat =/= conflict. Conflict is good, it creates RP. Combat is only good in very specific situations that has everyone involved build up to it, like security organizing sparring boxing matches in the holodeck or a hostage situation contained to a dock. But combat in and of itself doesn't create conflict, it creates annoyance OOCly and 'omg run away' in IC, and during running away or dying how much RP are you doing? Exactly, none. Then, afterward, you have to RP being afraid of the big bad firefight which is not even canon and you have to act like nothing happened next round. Oh yay, so much fun this non-lasting RP is in a setting where people try to develop their character over multiple rounds. Woohoo. Conflict, on the other hand, is created from much better set up scenarios, from something ad mundane as characters simply not liking eachother to a misunderstanding after someone throws an item to someone doing their job wrong by accident. Conflict happens naturally, while the combat feels so incredibly forced and inserted into the round for no other reason than 'lawl RP' like 95% of the time when it involves antagonists. And trust me, I don't dislike antagonists. I like vampire, wizard/technomancer, the occasional ninja and since the rework to Changelings that no longer requires them to murder crewmembers I think their RP has improved significantly. I just think that a few select gamemodes are so set on forcibly inserting combat in the round without making the buildup feel natural enough that it just ruins those gamemodes outright. Yes, they can make it work with a good gimmick. Keyword is can, but with so many variables that can make it go wrong you'll need three four leaf clovers, the planets to align and a rabbit's foot for each antagonist to even have a chance of having it work. For cult specifically, I think a lot of their stuff is fine, the blood runes create a nice bit of conflict for the crew if they are discovered, even if some of the powers are dumb, they have the possibility of creating an actual cult within the crew without having to forcibly kidnap everyone and they have a lot of opportunities for conflict with the chaplain especially. But they apparently need that arming rune that gives them choppy stab stab weapons and OP armor, but instead of using the garb to roleplay with and the blades like sacred relics or something, as soon as someone uses them the entire cult grabs a set and the slaughterfest begins, at which point people may as well cryo because RP is about to end. Mercs is already a big improvement over cult, visitors are a nice change of pace for the station, I think. I have seen merc rounds do it well, it's entirely possible. It's just that of all the tools they get, they get like... What. 2, 3 rooms full of nothing but military grade weapons and equipment? Yes, they have the freedom to make any gimmick they like, but when their options for tools are so limited, and overwhelming in the 'beeg gunz', it's not a very big surprise that even over half of the good gimmicks have to include them in some way. And unless the gimmick is super fantastic and coordinated with admins, security is going to get suspicious, the mercs are not willing to give the weapons up since it's pretty much all the tools they have and while that would create conflict, sec being sec and antags having weapons in hand this at least 99% of the time results in a firefight. Woohoo. I think heist is the best of the three, but with the same problem as merc, although to a lesser degree. Their arsenal is still an overwhelming amount of guns and other apparatus to hurt and kill, and kind of not enough 'stealthy steals' or 'integrated item liberation'. With how many guns they have you might as well just call the gamemode 'robbery' instead of heist so people will at least expect guns pointed at them.

Dismissals are up but gonna reply anyway. I know the combat isn't the end goal, but at least 9 out of 10 times it does happen in those gamemodes. Whether that is due to security, the antags' gimmick, the antags' available tools or just plain stupidity, kind of wasn't the point. The point was that combat sucks and kind of kills all RP going on because either security walls you off or the firefight reaches you and kills you with no real involvement from yourself. Combat is boring. Click other people more than they click you, unga bunga. No character interaction is taking place, bonds aren't being deepened and problems aren't being explored, it's just laser fire, hack and slash weapons and skulls being bashed in, it's all chaos. My idea was with taking these modes away from secret rotation to get people to be less combat-happy and not default to it, which seems to be the case from a lot of posts that I'm reading around the forums. (And it doesn't help that, what, 80-90% of the gear antags receive are meant to hurt and kill people, and only the remaining percents are actual roleplay tools.) Perhaps it's the antags' flavor text, perhaps it's their tools, perhaps it's security being trigger happy, who knows. I just know that I have never, ever, ever seen a single cult round that, if the cultists didn't end up doing nothing because of time constraints, didn't end up in some sort of combat fest. Not once. Not back when I started, not back when I was admin, not recently either. I've never seen a merc or heist team enter the station without some weapons on their person. I want to interact with antagonists, I want to have a fun round. But combat simply isn't fun, which is why I made the suggestion.

I want to preface this with that it's probably very biased, but here we go anyway: Combat in SS13 sucks. It's dumb, chaotic, and really does not add to any roleplay whatsoever if you were not in the buildup to the combat. Which usually means everyone except security and maybe command. (Exaggerating for effect.) This means that when certain gamemodes are chosen for secret, the round -will- devolve into a combat scenario between security and whatever is the shooty mcbangbang antagonist of the shift, unless there's a very gifted antag that manages to keep the situation from going that way, but those seem to be few and far between. In particular, this scenario tends to play out with most team-based antagonists (heist, merc, cult). Not exclusively, but those gamemodes this tends to happen on the most. I have also been reading recent threads about how antag roleplay is a problem usually because of security and/or their guidelines, but I also think the tools given to some antags really doesn't help the situation. Now, I'm not saying delete these gamemodes (however much I'd like cult to be removed from the server forever) but I do think that gamemodes that usually end in a big battle or slaughterfest should not be in secret rotation. Cult is the biggest offender of this, I think, mostly because of its endgoal provided of (in essence) 'bahahaha destroy everything by summoning evil god', but heist and merc are also repeat offenders. In contrast, all other antags feel like they get a lot more freedom in their endgoals and the tools they get to work with, such as wizard or vampire. Plus, it doesn't help that security generally has the mentality of 'WALL OFF CREW FROM ALL REMOTELY POSSIBLE THREATS', which makes sense ICly but why even have antags at that point. I think that by removing these from the secret rotation, we can start shifting the server mentality in the longterm from combat-ready to more roleplay-ready. Another point I want to bring up, is that no matter the buildup, roleplay involved toward the combat or how much sense it makes ICly, it is simply not fun when you get caught up in whatever combat is going on and die because of something your character was not even involved in (usually because of security's wall-off mentality). And at the end of the day, people log in to have fun and have a good time on the server but oops security and antags were given too many guns today so now everyone has to die. And it's different from say, a traitor pulling a gun in the bar and having an isolated incident there, but when an extended firefight or slugfest takes place along a bigger part of the station, having bystanders be killed that way just sucks (especially without cloning). And don't give me that 'oh but them's just the breaks' or 'just play another character' crap, those are lame excuses to allow this. When you log on, you select a character you want to play and you may not be in the mood for anything else. Plus, assuming you're there from roundstart, generally trying to play is about a 2-hour investment of time to try and get some enjoyment here. Getting your fun ruined because 'that's just how it goes' is a terrible mentality. And at least if these modes are required to be voted people won't have to waste 45 minutes to one and a half hour figuring out what the gamemode is before going 'no thanks' and leaving (looking at you again, cult). Bottom line, remove combat oriented antags like cult, merc and heist from secret rotation so big bad shootouts don't have to ruin a 2 hour investment for all non-security on station. Thank you.

Honestly, I don't think this is a good thing to use as a blanket solution. From what I gather in these comments, it seems to be a certain few jobs that are the problem, so why suddenly put this on everything? Having this for the specific problem jobs would be fine with me, but to suddenly have every job like that seems a bit too much. Also, regarding the idea of 'just go visitor'... This simply does not make sense for every character. A lot of characters would simply have no reason to go visit the place they usually work at, and the same goes for suddenly going a different job. As far as I'm aware, it would not make sense for a CMO to suddenly go medical doctor the round after, because that would just straight up be a demotion. Same for service roles - You can't just expect a bartender to do botany, and vice versa. It's not a viable solution at all. As for the limited slot problem... Yes, that is a problem for interesting jobs, but consider what will happen if you give it more slots. It's very possible that, depending on the job, because there's more people doing it it becomes vastly less interesting. Plus, it should make sense within the context of the station as well. Why would a station (or ship, later, whatever) need 4 investigators on their security team? They simply don't, so why would they allow that many on station at once? Two bartenders makes sense, due to the size of the bar (in reality the bar size doesn't matter that much but it makes sense in context), but four are simply not needed. And, people would just get in eachother's way anyway. I think this system should be limited to those highly contested jobs, or an incentive should be added for characters to be able to come on shift as visitor or off-duty. Like being allowed to go on-duty if needed. Say, when some officers leave the round and leave sec a bit understaffed or something. That's just my thoughts and opinion though.

So I took a look at the available jobs, and I noticed something that was semi-odd to me. If the head of personnel is supposed to handle both supply and service, why is there a quartermaster? Sure, it helps to manage the department, but all in all supply is pretty small. Miners and cargo techs, and they share an office to boot. So I wondered, why is there a Quartermaster, essentially command for supply, but nothing like that for Service? In theory this is the Head of Personnel, yes, but this would bring its own problems, such as it being a whitelisted job and definitely not having one every round. So, I thought that a Manager job would help - a Quartermaster but for Service, that will help with managing the bar, the kitchen, hydroponics, the chapel (if needed) and any eventual entertainment events. They could be in charge of the department's funds to order things from cargo, decide how much alcohol or meat is given out and what plants should and shouldn't be grown. Some extra benefits would be having a second command-lite role like quartermaster, since quartermaster is a single slot role and is easily taken, preventing others from taking it. And while we're at it, it would be a good opportunity to perhaps seperate the Service department from the Civilian department on the crew manifest. They have their own communication channel and everything, I'm not sure why it's lumped in with civilian.

I've been away for a while and recently returned, played for a bit. It's all nice and dandy, but I sometimes wonder what people think of Yumi OOCly (and ICly but that's probably best to be kept in IC). I kind of really hope I'm not being overbearing or too repetitive with her, I'd love to hear what others think about her.

I think we may also need to address the point of 'in a threatening way'. Showing equipment to a cadet wouldn't apply to this infraction, but drawing it in the middle of the hallway would. I'm also pretty sure there's a way to draw things non-aggressively and aggressively. Perhaps we can judge it by that? I don't see this as a bad addition but I do think it needs to be thought through all the way.

Then we should at least get some official documentation the staff would follow that we can use for character creation as well. That or simply restrict jobs on character select with certain disabilities, like we do now with age. That would at least prevent a lot of confusion over the subject. I received one in the past but apparently it was outdated and unofficial.

I'm going to add that I was never told I could prepare something for the meeting, and after the meeting I immediately asked if Yumi was fine in engineering like this, to several staff members, and got a 'yes' answer from them. Then, out of the blue a bit later, I got reprimanded for Yumi being a mute engineer, and I'm still pretty pissed about it.

I'm going to say now I'm 100% against forced conversion. I already hate cult enough, don't make Rev worse by making conversions forced. Forced ICly would be one thing, but not mechanically, please. Like said above, if we wanted to play an antag, we'd tick the box in character setup. If we don't, we do not want to play that role. This is why forced conversion is so incredibly dumb (and why cult is so incredibly terrible). And it's made even worse when you don't know the game mode because it's secret, get converted against your OOC will, then leave the round because you don't want to play it, and then get blamed for 'ruining the round' for the antags. It's a social and mechanical trap and it should not be implemented imo. Scaling up the starting amount of antags is a good idea, though. Antags should have a chance, but it should not be through 'you have no choice you are antag now.' That will only worsen it.

I didn't address it because I thought I did in the opening post. Might have been something else, my bad. It's honestly very easy to say that social policies like 'it's too dangerous for mutes' can have changed since this takes place in the future, social policies can change over time. Plus, it's also easy to say that people with disabilities need to keep to more rules. There's plenty of solutions that don't have to include banning disabilities from certain jobs. And honestly, from my experience with engineering, people don't communicate much even if they can talk. Though that can have changed since then. I'd rather have disabilities that still leave characters physically able to fill out jobs like engineering with extra rules rather than 'you have a fun gimmick so no fun jobs for you.'

"Impacts your ability to be productive in a role." That is complete bullshit for muteness in engineering, since it doesn't impact your ability to actually do physical things. I've literally played Yumi like that for over a year and guess what, she was more productive than most engineers at that time. So much so that at one point, back on the Exodus, a CE at that time had to leave and appointed her, a mute engineering apprentice, to interim CE to take over instead of any other engineer present at that time. Yes, mute characters cannot call for help, but that is exactly why you're extra careful as a mute person. You make sure your sensors are up, you don't head into unneccesary danger like into firefights as an engineer where you don't belong. You don't go fixing dangerous areas without supervision unless your CE tells you you're good enough to do it by yourself. Where I got the banned everywhere but civilian from, literally from the headmins at the time. The policy completely destroyed playing Yumi for me when it happened. So I asked the headmins where she would be allowed to be played, and the answer was 'civilian roles only'. I think people need to re-evaluate the balance of realism vs. fun because I think in this case fun is sacrificed for realism which is never a good thing.